One Thousand Gifts

Well, I've decided I'm going to go ahead and do this here - primarily because if I don't do it here, I'll forget to do it at all. And since I was recently exhorted to cultivate an attitude of thankfulness, it seemed appropriate. So here goes.

1. The dark times of life, that let us see God's grace more abundantly.

2. The overwhelming gift of knowing my Lord, Jesus Christ.

3. The cleansing of conscience.

4. God. There are too many perfections in Him to be looked at separately; I am thankful - infinitely thankful - for just Who He is.

5. The beauty of the night sky on a cold winter night.

6. Autumn leaves.

7. The smell of woodsmoke.

8. The roar of the ocean and the scream of gulls and the feel of sand.

9. Sweaters and tea on rainy days.

10. Birdsong.

11. Frost.

12. A pale blue autumn sky.

13. Berries on my dogwood outside.

14. The crunch of dry leaves underfoot.

15. The knowledge that all this beauty is a mere shadow of what is to come.

The Changing Seasons

"He appointed the moon for seasons; the sun knows its going down."

It's now September, which means that Fall is just around the corner - even though it still feels like August around here. Autumn is my favourite season, and whenever it comes around I'm reminded of the faithfulness of God that is revealed in the changing seasons. He has appointed "seedtime and harvest" for all time and continues yearly to provide sun and rain, cool weather and hot, making His sun to shine upon the just and the unjust. He holds the universe together, as Fernando Ortega wrote in his song "This Good Day" -

"If rain clouds come
Or the cold winds blow
You're the One Who goes before me,
And in my heart I know
That this good day
It is a gift from You.
The world is turning in its place
Because You made it to.
I lift my voice to sing a song of praise
On this good day."

This world, this planet that He has made, turns because He made it to. We have no fear that the sun will not rise tomorrow or that spring won't come after winter, because we know that God holds all things together by the word of His power, and He is ever faithful to provide. How great a God our salvation rests upon!

Amos

The Minor Prophets are sadly neglected. I think many of us fall into the trap of considering them stiff and harsh; or they are just so small that they get lost, sandwiched between the great books of Ezekiel and Matthew as they are. However, Lucy recently read the book of Amos and we were discussing it together, and I was very blessed reading it for myself. It is a powerful book and has a great deal of feeling wrapped up in it, and it is, like all the rest of the Bible, of great worth.

The book begins, directly after Amos' calling from the humble occupation of a shepherd, with a declaration of the might of the Almighty that is reminiscent of the latter chapters of Job -

The LORD roars from Zion, and utters His voice from Jerusalem; the pastures of the shepherds mourn, and the top of Carmel withers.

Immediately afterward He launches into a judgment of the nations for their lack of mercy and their persecution of God's people. For these things He says that He will break the gates of Damascus and send their people into exile; He will destroy the palaces of Gaza; He will set fire to the city of Tyre and to the lands of Edom and Moab and to the people of Ammon. From other books of the Bible we see that God sometimes used the neighboring nations to lead Israel into exile and show them their sins, and teach them to return to Him; but despite that, the heathen nations still had to answer for their treatment of God's chosen people, and He does send His wrath upon them.

But the judgment is not limited to the heathen people. In chapter 2 God turns to Judah and declares their sin of having despised His law, and declares again that He will send fire upon the palaces of Jerusalem. But the main focus of the book of Amos is on Israel, for these are the things he saw "concerning Israel." Here in pronouncing judgment God does not merely state their sins; He also speaks of His goodness to them and contrasts that with their sins -

Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was as strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit above and his roots beneath. Also it was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt...

There is a mixture of plea and anger in the tone of the words, that is not there in His addresses to the wicked nations. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth," God says in chapter 3; "Therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." The punishment He gives to the people of Israel (and gives to believers now) is a good thing, meant to teach and instruct and correct. "For whom the LORD loves, He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he delights" (Proverbs 3:12). Discipline is a blessing, for God gives it to those whom He loves in order to set their feet on the straight and narrow path. It is His rod and staff that comfort us, as David says, and they are used equally to correct us when we sin and to protect us from enemies.

Israel despised God's first "round of discipline," if I can put it that way, and did not return to Him in repentance; yet again in chapter 5 He gives them a call to "repent and live." He commands them not to seek the land or other gods, but to call on Him, for "He made the Pleiades and Orion; He turns the shadow of death into morning and makes the day dark as night; He calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the face of the earth; the LORD is His name." The people are to seek good and not evil, and so to live; for God will send judgment and wrath on Israel and send them into exile in Damascus because of their sin.

Chapter 7 presents an image like Abraham when he pleaded for Sodom and Gomorrah. God shows Amos a vision of plague - locusts - first, and yet when Amos humbly and boldly cries out for Him to forgive the people, God, as He did for Abraham, says that He will not send the locusts. Again God shows a vision of fire, and again Amos pleads for Israel because it is so small and, one may infer, weak. And God, who "knows our frame, and remembers that we are dust," turns away this manifestation of His wrath and says again that it will not be so. There is, however, no record of a plea from Amos during the third vision, of the plumb line; he goes and speaks God's word to Israel, until the priest orders him to be silent and leave. Thus Amaziah the priest brings about God's judgment on himself, for contradicting the word of a true prophet.

Surely the punishment spoken of throughout seems very harsh: Israel will be overcome by her enemies and her palaces will be plundered, and so on, and God will bring destruction upon her. Yet the prophecy concludes with a hopeful tone within the somber context. God again declares His faithfulness to the house of Jacob, and says that, though He will destroy the sinful kingdom, yet He will not completely annihilate Israel. When the wicked have been dealt with, God speaks through Amos that He will again restore the people of Israel to the place that He gave them.

'I will plant them in their land, and no longer shall they be pulled up from the land I have given them,' says the LORD your God.

So the whole of the book is both strong and encouraging and full of applicable truth, for we can see a multitude of things about God in the prophecy. We see that He is strong to save His people and punish their persecutors, and that He will not leave them in trouble forever. We see His holiness and strength in dealing with sin, mingled with His mercy and everlasting love in that He persistently shows them the way of repentance, and that He always has a remnant of people who follow Him.

Grace

I recently reread some of A.W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy and came across this beautiful passage in his chapter "The Grace of God."

"We can never know the enormity of our sin, neither is it necessary that we should. What we can know is that 'where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.' To abound in sin: that is the worst and the most we could or can do. The word abound defines the limit of our finite abilities; and although we feel our iniquities rise over us like a mountain, the mountain, nevertheless, has definable boundaries: it is so large, so high, it weighs only this certain amount and no more. But who shall define the limitless grace of God? Its 'much more' plunges our thoughts into infinitude and confounds them there. All thanks be to God for grace abounding."

What an inspiring truth! And one that we as Christians often take for granted and lose sight of altogether. But Tozer is right; if we would meditate on the "much more" of God's grace, it would overwhelm us and fill us with joy. I don't think we can read passages like Romans 5:20-21, or Ephesians 2, or I John 3:1-3, without some measure of delight in the love of Christ, which "surpasses knowledge." How great is the love of God.

Bad Things? Good People?

One of the most common complaints that Christians hear from unbelievers these days is, "If God is so good, why do all these bad things happen?" Or, alternatively, "If there is a God, then why is there so much starvation and so many wars?" What a person really means when they say this is, "Why do bad things happen to innocent people?" No one really expends much brain power on the question of why tragedies happen to bad people - either because they don't believe in bad people (difficult to do, considering history, but not impossible), or because it seems fitting that bad things should happen to bad people. It's when a person who doesn't seem to have done anything wrong is effected that we ask the question, "Why did it happen, if God is so good?"

Theologians and philosophers, and a few random preachers and such, have written on the problem; a well-known book nowadays that deals with the subject is transparently entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. However, the question is a rather simple one to answer in the end and can be refuted from a number of different angles. The first is that all those who ask the question will freely admit that they are saying that bad things do happen, and so "bad" exists. Obviously. If asked if they then believe that there is good in the world - the way things ought to be - they will say yes again.

From here, the argument is fairly easy. The existence of bad things, the complainer will admit, does not negate the existence of good things and just plain Good - rather it proves it, because "bad" cannot exist in a person's rational thinking without there being "good" for the bad to be compared to. Similarly, you cannot speak of darkness without assuming the existence of light; a blind man does not call what he is in "darkness," because he is unable to compare it with something else - light. Therefore, following this logic, the presence of bad and bad things can no more negate the existence of the One Supreme Good than it can the existence of the goodness we see around us; it actually strengthens the case for God's existence and His Goodness.

There's also another point to be made about the question (which is usually meant rhetorically), and that is that the person is assuming that there are good people in the world. From a Christian perspective, this cannot be accepted as true. While it's obvious from experience that not all people are as bad in their actions as they could be, it is clear from Scripture that there is no one who is "good" - Jesus states that when the rich young ruler calls Him "Good Rabbi"; Christ replied with, "Why do you call me good? There is no one good but One, that is, God." (Mat. 19:17) There are other passages that deal with this doctrine (known as total depravity), including Paul in Romans 3:

"There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one."

Once a person can wrap their mind around the fact that we are all evil at heart, with no redeeming qualities in us (as the Bible teaches), it becomes clear that we all truly deserve the things we call tragedies. Most of us realize that bad people deserve punishment; when we then grasp the fact that we are all "bad people," then we are logically forced to concede that we all deserve punishment as well. It is only by the goodness of God that they are trying to disprove that any of us are saved from suffering the fruits of our sin.

This argument is best used with those who profess to believe the Bible, and then it takes the wind out of their sails. Not, of course, that it is terribly easy to change a person's opinion, even if you have bucketloads of fine arguments and logic to back you up; unfortunately, the response is usually either irrational anger or the common phrase, "Well, you believe what you want to and I'll believe what I want to" (which is irrational enough in itself). However, these are two of the arguments that I learned in philosophy class and reasoned through, and I've actually used the first on someone who thanked me and said it made sense. I don't know if she actually meant it or was just trying to end the conversation, but I'll hope for the best.